Dr. Dor Atzmon Among the BISFAI Organizers

Bar-Ilan University's BISFAI symposium in Foundations of Artificial Intelligence was held last September for the 17^th time, bringing together Israel's AI research community from every university across the country. The conference was first founded in 1989 by Prof. Martin Golombic, who also attended this year's event. Among the conference's organizers this year was Dr. Dor Atzmon, of Bar-Ilan's Faculty of Engineering.

The term AI often makes many think of robots or conversations with ChatGPT, but Dr. Atzmon, who teaches an introduction to AI course, says the term was coined in the 1950s. "AI is a broad field that covers various topics and diverse methods, including problem-solving, reasoning, and learning. My research, for example, explores a field in artificial intelligence called search: finding the correct sequence of actions, for example, for one or several robots to execute without interfering with each other."

Dr. Atzmon organized the conference alongside Dr. Yoni Zohar from the Computer Science Department. The conference featured three sessions, and Dr. Atzmon moderated a session that included a talk by Dr. Michael Fire from Ben-Gurion University. "His talk covered Dark LLMs, the malicious uses of ChatGPT and similar tools, and suggestions for coping with this issue," he explains. Another Faculty of Engineering representative at the conference was Dr. Ofir Lindenbaum, who gave a short lecture on his research on deep learning.

A special session was dedicated to the three Israeli researchers who have been accepted as research fellows into one of the two leading international AI associations in the last two years: Bar-Ilan's Prof. Noa Agmon who received a fellowship from EurAI; and Bar-Ilan's Prof. Gal Kaminka and Ben-Gurion University's Prof. Ariel Felner, who were appointed fellows at AAAI. The session was moderated by Prof. Sarit Kraus, the departing Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences, herself a research fellow at both associations.

The conference was conducted in collaboration with the Israeli Association for Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), which awarded Google-funded prizes for outstanding doctoral dissertations. The conference's sponsors on behalf of Bar-Ilan University were the Faculty of Engineering, the Faculty of Exact Sciences, and the Department of Computer Science, as well as the Research Authority and DSAI (Data Science and AI Institute). The Alter Association for Long Term Existence and Resilience was among the conference's contributors. "The conference was a great success, people enjoyed themselves, and significant research collaborations were made," concludes Dr. Atzmon.